Penguin Google Update Thoughts

Every time there is an update by Google the world goes nuts, the latest update “Penguin” has been aimed at affecting link spam/over optimization of link and seems to have hit people hard. Just the name drove some people I know to want to spit (someone suggested it should be called the Titanic update)

I actually thought all the time spent trying to name the update was some of the worst time wasting on the net. If you are doing this as a business then who cares what the update is called? All I care about is how it has hit me and people I work with.

My Thoughts on Off Page
Matt Cutts has spoken about over optimization recently, and I do not always believe what he says, and I think this update has (partly) slapped those of us who use blog networks and use lots of Exact Match Domains and pair them with exact match keywords. So you own yellowcreditcards.com and 90% of your links have the anchor text of “yellow credit cards” and you are in trouble (I actually think the % is much lower than 90 but you get the example).

I also think people who use lots of really poor links with their anchor text in are going to get hit harder than ones who just have a few. So that 3 page site with 200k profile links may take a while to sort out..

There has been so many posts by people talking about link profiles and how we need to mix the linking structure up that none of us should have been caught but we were. It is easy to see why, when you are paying for links to be built you want to make them earn you more and the best way to do that is to climb the rankings for a specific keyword. Paying for a link to be built when it is just going to use your url or maybe some random word seems to go against our nature as link builders doesn’t it?

So link profiles need to be sorted out and in my mind this means

- More links but ones with no keywords as anchor text – so links to thenewbiehelper.com rather than using keyword anchor text

- Delete crappy old links if you can

Is It Worth It?
I know I mention this in another post but it is worth talking about…Even if you can  do all the new links you need and get your link profile sorted it is going to take a couple of months (at least I think) for your site to recover in the rankings and my question is ..Is it all worth it?

If you look at a site that at its peak earned you $1 -$2 a day is it worth spending the time and money to do all this? Your time has value, is fixing the link profile on a EMD site pushing people towards an adsense click or some long tail item on Amazon for 4% worth it?

Which Sites To Work On
I know of one person who has dropped 10+ sites over the last few months and she told me that she is now looking at her sites and the first criteria is (if they have been hit in the latest update especially)

-Do they have less than six months left before renewal?
If the answer is yes she is just leaving them to their own devices and will see what they make between now and renewal but there is a good chance they are gonners. If they do have 6 months then the sites will get a look in at least.

Someone else is working on different criteria and this is quite an interesting idea. Mark Thompson said he is looking at his sites and thinking “Can i do content curation on them?” if not it sounds like they are for the chop.

Thinking about these two ideas you can see how it makes sense, if I have a site in a niche that I can use content curation on and it is at least six months before I have to pay to renew it maybe it is worth trying.

How To Recover My Site From Penguins
It is 2 steps really

1. Choose The Sites Worth Working On
2. Decide How You Are Going To Change The Way You Do Things